Graphics in KQ9

[adam1000]

Hi.
Lately I was looked over the new screenshots with attention and they look very good. The textures are made very nicely and there is quite a lot of various details which make the game look more realistic and alive. Though still the graphics are not perfect. I mean- I don't expect any fireworks , super new shaders and so on. I didn't ever expect the graphics to be any close to what the designers show in recent commercial games yet I would be pleased with something like Broken Sword 3 for example. Don't get me wrong the game looks tremendously good and well especially for a fan project! But some scenes regardless to the great textures look dull because the textures are very "blurred" so to say and even though the art is nice, it vanishes because of the blurness of the textures. The models are quite good though might be better but theirs current stance is fine with me! Also some scenes are far worse than the others. For example the "Talk about Rosella" scene- looks really horribly. It's just a screenshot so maybe there is more arround them but as I see it there are only very dull textures ,the two characters and the bench. It just needs some work. Well cutting to the point do you plan any improvements on the graphics? I mean from the engine level. For example higher resolutions of textures? Some scenes look very nice but a lot of them look quite like Simon The Sorcerer 3d which makes me vommiting just because of the memory of that wretched game.
Anyway- besides those few "flaws" if you can actually call them taking in mind that it's an uncommercial, free and amatour game it's great. And it really looks like a commercial one but of course from like 1999 or so.
Concluding- fabolous work people. I think the whole community will agree with me on this matter. So- keep it going. I hope the storyline will be as good as the graphics(or better).  

[Allert van der Leij]

hey Adam

Finally a topic I can relate to...

Basically, what you're seeing in the screenshots, are a mixture of maya screenshots (edgar and graham on the bench) and renderings (graham ascending stairs and the Royal Nest with Azure and Ariel).

The graphics which were taken directly from maya, obviously aren't lit properly yet, and there's no shadow present. This will be incorporated in the engine (and really fleshed out in renders) of course. I agree with you on the amount of (or rather lack of) texture-quality there is in some closeup shots. This is because our sets are built with a static camera-position in mind. These textures are being reworked for their purpose for cutscenes and/or prerendered stuff. For instance, the shot you see with Graham greeting Beauty at the Pawn Shoppe, wasn't really textured with the intention of doing closeups.

Basically, what I'm saying is, don't be too disappointed on the amount of detail in textures and/or geometry (even character poses) yet, because most of these shots were merely made to show you some of the stuff  that we have been working on all this time When the game's finished, you will hardly notice any blurred or less detailed textures.

[Lollotte]

I am totally syched about the graphics!

I come froma graphics family--a lot of my relatives are tech guys--and they're gushing over the way it looks. It's most likely the best looking KQ ever. I hope it doesn't have any bugs, though, cuz I've been having constant problems with 7 and 8--8 especially.

Hey--I have some questions. Are the current screenshots conveying the look of KQIX accurately? Will the scenes be more streamilined in the real thing?

Thanx!!!!!

[Yonkey]

They're accurate in terms of detail/quality, but we are still trying to figure out how to accomplish facial expressions & lip sync in-game, and things like in-game fog and dynamic lighting that we still haven't really had a chance to experiment with yet.  

Also, it's not exactly possible to do any of those "blurred" screenshots in-game since we're not expecting people to have graphic cards with high anti-aliasing/anisotrophy.

[Lollotte]

Well, couldn't you employ a function that determines the users' graphic capabilities allowing them to enjoy high quality graphics if they are capable? That would be much better for the people who can actually view/accomodate such graphics.

There's some of my knowledge for you  .

[Yonkey]

It actually does that automatically already.  

The problem is that the game runs slightly slower if you have it set too high (of course, this depends on the video card & CPU you have).  For this reason, the graphics are being designed with little or no in-game anti-aliasing, and the user can set it to whatever they like depending on their system, by changing their Display settings in the Control Panel.

[Lollotte]

Okay, that's fine. However, at the highest level of anti-aliasing and most textures, what would be the base level system recquired to operate at a good speed? Would my 2.6 gigahertz Pentium 4 NVidia 5400 Dual AGP moniator system be up to the task?

[Yonkey]

Most likely.

If you like, you can try out the Torque Demo and see how well it runs on your system.  KQIX will be a bit more involved than that demo, but at least you'll get a general idea.

[Shadowfax]

Hi, just a general question; how long did it take for the KQ IX team to create a fully rendered cut-scene type 3D animation for the game (including voice sync etc...)

The reason I ask is that for my KQ IX project, I (having failed to get my highly recalcitrant home-made 3D engine to function properly), just wanted to get a generic idea on time involved (I am now doing hand-drawn animation frames as its the only thing that works...trouble is its terribly slow to do!)

Did you consider any hand-animation in the game or was it true 3D from the word "go."

[Louisiana Night]

It wasn't planned to be 3D "from the word go". If I remember correctly, the decision to make it 3D was made by Richard Flores(though I'd need someone else to confirm that, since I'm not that sure of my memory ).

[Yonkey]

It wasn't planned to be 3D "from the word go". If I remember correctly, the decision to make it 3D was made by Richard Flores(though I'd need someone else to confirm that, since I'm not that sure of my memory ).

That's correct.  I think Rich said it in the Journal.

[Allert van der Leij]

@ Shadowfax

Hey there

Cutscenes (or cinematics as they are usually called) take quite a while to finish. Basically, everything has to look just right, including shadow, advanced lighing, all the way down to lipsynching every character. They will exceed the ingame quality, so everything has to look nice, one advantage though. is that we don't have to worry so much on polycount (since it'll all be rendered to 2D imagery anyway, something your 3D card doesn't deal with at all)

Most of the work consists of getting characters to be rigged perfectly (including facial rigs), so they can perform exactly like the concept art on paper.

Once that's done, we have bring in the backgrounds,  block the poses, and time them into framed shots. This is also called an animatic.

After that, the actual animation begins, with a LOT of revising and tweaking to get them to look just right in the camera-frame.

To explain the lipsynch part in a bit more detail, we have gone through some troubles. We first made blendshapes, untill we discovered that Torque didn't support blendshapes, so we had to make bone-driven facial animation, which takes quite a lot of time.

Once all characters are animated and lipsynched and they have facial animation, lights are placed and configured, and everything else is taken care of as to camera settings (motionblur and depth of field), each shot is saved seperately, so we can distribute them between teammembers, so they can render these shots (like a sort of renderfarm if you will).

In the end, when everything comes together, the voices, soundeffects, and music are added. And on top of that, everything goes into postproduction, to do colorcorrection, exaggerate blur/DOF, add particle effects (if it doesn't require a specific Maya dynamics effect, we'd rather use post-effects, because otherwise it'd take too long) etc...

So roughly, all in all, depending on the size of the cinematic, it can take a team of 4 to 8 people about 3 to 4 weeks to finish one regular 1 minute long cinematic (that is, if everybody works as hard as they can 7 days a week from 9-5 SOLELY on the cinematic)

Hope to have informed you enough Feel free to ask more specifically if you want to know more about one specific area of the process.

[Shadowfax]

Hey there!

Thanks for your very informative post...there are several rather complex questions I may wish to ask you in the near future (I may IM them to you to save clogging this forum up with my complex inquiries!)

The timescale does seem a bit awesome I do admit! I am only just discovering the costly pitfalls of pure 2D driven animation. It is simple in one way because it doesn't require multiple fields/layers of information (you just "draw it all in and colourise") but because the "look" is one of a fine art painting come to life...it...well...is like drawing 3000+ fine art pictures in different poses to create even a 30sec excerpt! Getting a bunch of engineers off their usual tasks to do such long and thankless jobs as this...is...well....proving difficult!

However...I will ask you this. Do you know of any possible graphics program where you can take a plain-Jane uncoloured outline and "colour" it in using a series of mathmatical algorithms pegged onto the image for the computer to follow (in English; a form of "colour by numbers" but the numbers corresponding to specific colouring techniques.) Because of the length of the process we are having to face via 2D "high-fidelity" animation means I am seriously considering building an "auto-colour" program; copying my hand colouring techniques and via A.I Fuzzy logic implement them on a raw wire frame sketch. Its as complex as it sounds and so has anyone tried it before - saving me from insanity! (Note; its not like a "filter" system on a commercial graphics program, this is "active colouring," please do not think I am insulting your intelligence...just making sure you understand my obscure meaning!)